Advance 9441 Take Two - Summer Lemon Dress

Oh look, Advance 9441 is back and in a lemon print just like past Heather had promised. Wow for once she didn't lie to us about sewing plans. (It's all her fault when posts about sewing plans don't come to fruition. She should know that I get distracted by shiny new things.)

Does this version of the pattern really need it's own blog post? Not really. But sometimes a fabric/pattern combo works out great and you want to post a gazillion pictures of it. So please bear with me and in return you can all have lemon bars at the end of the post.  I sure Froggie won't dust them all off while you're reading.

Let's talk about this beautiful lemon cotton lawn for a minute, because it's only gracing my body thanks to the kindness of another sewer.  I saw this beautiful fabric on Handmade Jane's blog last year when she sewed up  a Mortmain Dress. That dress instantaneously filled me with a bad case of fabric lust. The colors, the painterly quality of the print, the sheer size of those lemons. It Was Perfection!  I quickly clicked on the link to Abakhan fabric with my credit card in hand.  Well my friends it was then that I found out that Abakhan does not deliver to the US.  NOOOOOOOO!!!!

Having been foiled in my attempt to purchase this fabric I went over to Twitter to whine about it. "Booo Hoo Hoo, poor me. Why can I not relieve my fabric lust by rubbing this fabric all over my face?"  (I might have left that last part out of my tweet.) Then Elena tweeted me,  "I can order some and mail it to your house." SHUT THE FRONT DOOR! YES, YES, YES!!!  So Elena awesomely enabled my fruit print fabric addiction and personally shipped 4 yards of lemon lawn to me.  I am forever indebted to her because this fabric is the bomb.

Fitting/style wise this version is the same as the one made in March, other than using the shorter sleeve length. I was actually surprised at how long the "shorter" kimono sleeves are. Guess I'm used to the length of gussetless kimono sleeves that just cover the shoulder.

Finally some sewing notes.  Cotton lawn is a lovely light weight thing, but it's semi-transparentness can cause problems in the underwear department.  I decided to underline/line this dress with some Siri interfacing from EOS.  I haven't been able to find anyone stocking true Siri poly/cotton lining like Gertie used to have in her online shop that one glorious summer. The lightweight rayon/cotton interface is the same weight and the hand is almost the same. It works great for underlining if you don't feel like shelling out $$ for cotton batiste.

The bodice portion is underlined and the skirt portion is a separate lining.  If I had to go back and do it again then the dress would have a proper full lining.  At the time I couldn't stomach the thought of sewing extra gussets and took the "easy" way out.  (The easy, easy way out would be picking a pattern that didn't have sleeve gussets.)  In the end my combo underlining/lining doesn't look any different from the right side of the garment and that's OK by me.

In closing I'll leave you with some theoretical tall glass of lemon aid and a good petticoat twirl picture. Ahhh summer, you're the best.